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world books

There are so many different places in the world. So many different ways of living life. Since I travelled to Asia and around Europe, I also started to travel more in reading - looking for books from other countries, preferably written from authors who live there.

At some point, I started a "7 continents" reading challenge: the idea of it is to explore the world by books from different continents and countries, and by visiting various world lists while planning the reads, to encounter the one or other unknown angle and fact about our world.

The challenge was inspired by an international reading challenge in 2012, and the side effect it had: looking at books from a different, geographical angle. And: mapping our world in continents and books, which turned into the most popular blog post in my book blog so far, and lead to this surprise realization:

"If you wanted to read around the world in 7 books, you actually would have to go and look for 4 books from Asia and 1 book from Africa - and then for 2 anthologies that cover the rest of the world in their pages."

In 2014, my reading focus shifted a bit, inspired by ... a hashtag. Here's the note from back then, and the link to the blog post: "The Year of Reading Women":

2014 has been declared as the year of reading women by the Guardian in an article - and that article now went viral with the hashtag: #readwomen 2014. The key note:

"Female authors are marginalised by newspapers and literary journals, and their books are given 'girly' covers. Take action against this inequality by making sure the next book you read is by a woman."

The thing is, for a while i had made it a habit to read a well-gender-balanced mix of authors. But then my focus had shifted towards the region the author is coming from. Now i just did a count of the books i read in 2013: 19 were written by women, 27 by men. and this january, i happened to read mainly male authors.

So i guess i will join #readwomen, too, and will read more books from women this year, starting with a book i had picked up in November, after the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Alice Munro: "Dear Life".

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Reading Reflections
Inspired by other book bloggers, I put some reading reflections together at the end of the year: